Quebec's Iconic Old Montreal Just Got a Brand-new Hotel-and It's Like Staying in an Immersive Art Museum

"Touting itself as a "contemporary art hotel," Sonolux has turned its eight floors into video art galleries, with handpicked works projected across hallway walls. Repurposed red movie theater seats allow you to sit down and contemplate the art. If you're not necessarily used to seeing immersive multimedia art in hotels, it can be a little jarring to step off an elevator into a dim space popping with raucous animation and sound effects, but one of Sonolux's goals is to provoke,"

"The debut exhibition, "Seeds of R/Evolution," doesn't pull punches, with unfiltered installations that delve into Canada's history and confront themes of radical change. The exhibition includes Lisa Jackson's "Savage," a haunting immersive musical playing on my floor as I got off the elevator. "Savage" is set in a residential school, one of the nightmare institutions where Canada's government kept Indigenous children taken from their families."

Sonolux occupies a crisply restored 1915 neo-classical bank building in Old Montreal, renovated for $18 million after decades of vacancy. The hotel, from hospitality group Épik Collection, positions itself as a contemporary art hotel by converting eight floors into video art galleries with handpicked projections along hallway walls and repurposed red movie-theater seats for viewing. Immersive multimedia pieces create loud, dimly lit spaces designed to provoke and unsettle guests when exiting elevators. The debut exhibition, "Seeds of R/Evolution," presents unfiltered installations probing Canadian history and radical change, including Lisa Jackson's "Savage," Comeau and Bradley's chronicle of the 1990 police raid, and a permanent ground-floor projection, "The Cosmic Code," with ambient sound by DJ Fred Everything.

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